


Maintaining Eye Contact

by affectivefallacy



Category: Selfie (TV)
Genre: 'why not just publish it?', Don't think about it too hard, F/M, Gen, I've had this fic sitting in a doc for a long time and thought, Julia and Henry are still dating but then it mentions events from the series after they broke up?, RIP a short sweet life, autistic!Eliza, btw the timeline of this fic isn't canon, god I loved this show, hello is anyone still in this fandom?, i hope you enjoy, if anyone is out there, no good reason for this, or however you like it, so here you go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28358580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/affectivefallacy/pseuds/affectivefallacy
Summary: He's supposed to be the teacher in this relationship, but Eliza Dooley is definitely a learning experience for Henry Higgs.
Relationships: Eliza Dooley/Henry Higgs
Kudos: 7





	Maintaining Eye Contact

It'd started that first day after he'd agreed to their arrangement. She'd barged into his office all fiery red hair and long tight-clad legs and pouting pink lips, and she'd asked if he could change her. 

Henry had tried to gain some basic details about her - the information gathering portion of reworking any defunct product - by asking her a series of questions about her likes and dislikes.

He didn’t get very far in the process, stalled by every unconventional answer she gave, while she sat awkwardly on the edge of his leather couch, looking like she didn’t quite know what to do with her hands once he’d taken her phone out of them, and darting her gaze this way and that throughout the somewhat-a-conversation they shared. 

“I am confused by …” _Eliza Dooley_ , Henry would supply in his mind for the foreseeable future. And the thing for Henry Higgs was, he wasn’t quite so sure he could change something that he didn’t understand. 

* * *

“So, what’s the deal for today, teach?” 

Henry frowned. “Don’t call me that.” He rearranged the papers spread over his desk into a neat stack and pushed back his chair to stand. “I think we should start with the basics. Just now, for instance, you walked into my office without greeting me.” 

“Oh,” Eliza took a step back and then forward again, as if rewinding a tape of their interaction. “Hello, Henry, how are you?” She drew the words out with an affected emphasis that made him wince. 

“You have to say it sincerely, Eliza.” 

She looked at him blankly. “That was sincere.” 

“You just said it exactly as I taught you last week.” 

“ _Yeah_ , because that’s _how_ you said it,” she answered as if this explanation was obvious. 

Henry paused to gather his thoughts, trying to not let frustration get the better of him. “You can’t just copy exactly what I say or do, you have to understand the nuances of socializing for yourself.” 

Eliza shook her head. “What’s the point? I said what you told me to say, what you’re _supposed_ to say. What else is there?”

“There’s a lot,” Henry said, moving forward to close the distance between them. He stood lined up face to face with her at a comfortable range. “There’s tone and timing and body language and -,” he stopped mid-sentence, catching her face downturned as she looked at the floor or the end of a chipped bit of nail polish, or something, he wasn’t sure what, but not at him. “Eliza, look at me.” 

She snapped her head up and then reared it back. “... You are standing very close right now,” she whispered. 

He tried not to flush, unsure why she would act as though he were doing something uncomfortable. “I am standing the appropriate distance from you for a conversation. And you - you are supposed to look the person you are speaking with in the eye. I told you this yesterday.” 

Eliza shifted her gaze to and from his face at that, as if a deliberate dismissal of his words with her eyes. They seemed to jump and skimmer across his face, a frown setting over her features. “I have to? At your _eyes_?” 

“Yes,” he said, “Obviously. When you make eye contact it shows that you are listening. Understood?” He looked at her and she seemed to be staring bewildered right into his face. It was a little unnerving. Much like the way she greeted him, it was as if something was lost in translation. “Eliza? Did you get that?” 

Her eyes shifted down to his mouth and back up, and she nodded, a circle with her head, hair swishing enough that he could smell her shampoo. “Um, yes?” 

He paused, unsure if she really had, but nevertheless he continued. “The point is to be sincere when you are talking with others, to care about what they have to say and what you are saying in turn. This means having a sincere tone and listening carefully, among other things.” 

As he spoke, she nodded and followed him with her eyes, seemingly eager to take in the information. That is, until he would turn to her with a question to confirm the information was imparted and she would mumble and flounce something completely off the mark, as though she hadn’t been listening at all. Henry sighed a lot over that first week, realizing what a challenge he was in for. 

* * *

The time wore on as he continued to instruct her over the first few weeks, breaking between lessons to teach her small decorum, but always returning to the overall theme of connecting with others, even in the simplest of conversations, something that seemed impossible for her to get past. Henry found himself in the position of standing in her apartment - upon a mutual insistence that she could not be taught everything there was to know within the confines of work hours (or relationships) - stumbling and crashing and burning through social roleplays. 

“Alright, we’re doing another dry run,” Henry sighed, turning back around to his spot and facing her. He saw Eliza roll her eyes and purse her lips but she went back to her position as well without any more fuss. “Small talk. Go.”  
  
Eliza plucked a smile onto her face, one that made Henry internally grimace and almost regret telling her to smile during these practices, cause it was nothing like her genuine smile he had seen sneak out before from behind her pinked lips and below her scrunched up nose.  
  
She walked up to him. “Hi Henry, how are you this morning?” The delivery came out stiff and with the same fall and rise of tone she carried every time she said it, since the day he’d first taught her. No matter how much he tried he couldn’t get her to shift the pitch or make it come out sounding more natural. It nettled him however, realizing the whole process was unnatural anyway, so what should he expect?  
  
“I’m good, Eliza,” he parried back. “And how are you?” He made a marked raise of his eyebrows at the end, indicating the instructed answer and follow up he expected. This is where she’d started to trip up before.  
  
“I’m fine. I’m good. Everything is a-okays-y,” she let out in a rush of breath. An abrupt silence followed and she looked around, fingers curling in and out at her sides. “You …” she faltered, bit her lip, and then gave Henry an exasperated look.  
  
He tried not to pinch his brow. Instead he opted to mouth something at her instead. _The weather_ he tried, even though it was the most damningly stereotypical thing he could think of, his own mind was stalling with how to further along office small talk when having to think about it, instead of it just flowing forward like a lurid dance between mouths.  
  
Eliza frowned at him and he mouthed it again, until her eyes lit up. “Oh yeah, weather! How’s that?” she huffed, reaching a hand up and waving it vaguely, “Rainy … and stuff ... lately.”  
  
Henry sighed. He picked himself up and decided to push forward. “Yes, the weather has been quite dreary as of late. I haven’t been able to get out in my garden as much as I’d like.”  
  
“You have a garden?”  
  
Henry’s eyebrows shot up at the immediate, mostly appropriate response, although it was delivered with a bit less pleasantry than he would have liked. “Yes, I,” he started out (He did, in fact, not have a garden. But it was roleplaying after all) and didn’t get very far before Eliza cut him off with a smile and laugh.  
  
That sudden, obnoxious, rude smile and laugh, her shoulders breaking polite posture, and mirth lighting behind her eyes. The totally inappropriate, unexpected response - that natural, scrunched nose and widened pink-lipped smile and laugh.  
  
“You like get down on your hands and knees in the dirt and sing to your azaleas?” She laughed again. “I can imagine that.”  
  
“Eliza …” He let out a groan. “That isn’t -”  
  
“Do you have one of those wide brimmed grandma sun hats?”  
  
“Eliza!”  
  
“Do you have one of those knee pad thingies, you know, so it’s not so hard on your old man knees.”  
  
“I think we should start again from the top.”  
  
“No, wait,” Eliza cried out, nevertheless between her giggles, “Ugh, don’t make me start again, Henry. This is taking forevvvvaaar.”  
  
“Cause you keep failing to maintain the parameters of polite small talk that I’ve outlined for you!” he shot back.  
  
“Okay, okay,” she suppressed her laughter and stood up straight again, twirling the pendant on the end of her necklace chain between her thumb and forefinger. “Uh … gardening is totes cool.” She looked off to the side, twirling the pendant round and round and biting her lip, gaze cast somewhere towards the ceiling past his shoulder. “What’s your favorite …,” she squinted, “vegetable?”  
  
“This isn’t working.”  
  
Henry moved around and plopped down onto the couch behind her. She followed suit and collapsed into the cushions, knees pressed together and long legs sticking out at a V angle, red hair fanned across the back pillows. She peeked over at him.  
  
“First of all,” Henry started, sitting up, “You have to follow your conversational partner’s line of thought, not just pick any random words that you think relate.” He waved his hand over her slouched form beside him, “And secondly, you’re still not following the body language guidelines I gave you. You have to stand up straight, face them fully with your body, don’t fidget around with your necklace like you’re bored, be more expressive, and actually make eye contact and listen to the person you’re speaking with.”  
  
Eliza let out a loud groan, slouching down further, “So many things to remember!”  
  
Henry shook his head. “You act as if just being an actual normal human being for once is the most exhausting thing in the world!”  
  
As soon as the words left his mouth he saw her face change, something sting behind her eyes, and her expression fall downward.  
  
“Whatever,” she spat out, getting up from the couch and walking away towards the bathroom. She slammed the door behind her and Henry winced.  
  
A few minutes passed before he got up from his spot and walked to the door. He rapped his knuckles lightly against the wood. “Eliza, I didn’t mean …” He wasn’t sure what he didn’t mean. He wasn’t even sure what he did mean in the first place. It was only early on in their lessons together, their second time meeting outside of work at her home, and he didn’t feel like he was making any progress with her. In changing her or understanding her.  
  
“Go away …” he heard her call from inside. Her voice sounded strained and it made his heartbeat pick up pace. He leaned a shoulder against the door and waited out the seconds, his mind turning over what he could possibly say, while his heartbeat disillusioned all the words in his head.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he said at last, the syllables sounding weak against his lips. There was no response, so he muttered it again, and left.  
  
He’d never gotten the simple answers to his simple questions that first day. They had to be discovered piece by piece, like the slow play of an entirely different kind of conversation than the type he was trying to teach her.  
  
 _“I am hurt by …”_

* * *

It was not long after that incident that Henry walked by the sales floor and saw Eliza standing there, her tall form bent over the small black trash can by her desk, everyone else out of the bullpen and into the lunchroom. She stood hunched there like a confused tangle of long limbs, her back to him as he passed by, and he was struck by a sudden pang of something other than annoyance at the sight of her doing something so absurd. It wasn’t so much the fact that she was eating over a trash can, “to help her digestion”, as it was that she was eating alone. He wondered if she was okay with that, whether she liked being bent uncomfortably over a garbage bin or not. 

The suspicion was she didn’t - she didn’t like being alone. Or else she wouldn’t have been asking him to do all the things that she was. She wouldn’t have gotten so angry at him the other day for implying the most alone thing of all - that she wasn’t like other people. Eliza Dooley was unfathomable and frustrating and exasperating but no matter how disastrously unaware of others she seemed to be, she was always keenly aware of when all those others left her out. She was just like anyone else in that regard.

It was strange. The weeks’ events had almost imperceptibly transformed the purpose of their work relationship in Henry’s mind - teaching Eliza seemed less now for the sake of making her tolerable to others and more for the sake of helping make the loneliness of the world more tolerable for her. Maybe that’s what she’d been gunning for all along. He’d just missed it. When he asked Charlie to run out and buy a trash can, and then sent him the next day around at lunch to invite Eliza into his office, Henry had no instruction, no task, no direction for her on how to change. He had a trash can for her to stand over, just the same as always, and his company if she wanted. 

So, somehow, when she confided in him the real reason why she did something that just a few days prior he’d called “extremely antisocial behavior”, he found himself eating his lunch over a trash can with her. A little less lonely, a little more tolerable. She stayed exactly where she was and he moved himself to join her. 

* * *

Henry started to realize the shift in their arrangement, as they spent more and more time doing things outside of instruction and learning. Sometimes they just both _were_. In those moments, the ostensible parameters of their relationship morphed and changed within an hour of time together more than she ever did. 

“Can you turn the air conditioner down?”  
  
Henry turned and looked over at Eliza, sitting on the couch next to him in his home office. They’d just finished one of their sessions together and had somehow ended up watching a movie – some romcom Eliza has forced him into, that at the moment he seemed to be paying more attention to than her.  
  
“Can you turn it down?” she asked again, eyes fixed on the screen, as she sat back in the couch, twirling her hair with one hand and bouncing her leg.  
  
“You’re cold?” Henry asked, observing her shaking leg.  
  
“No,” Eliza said, still looking at the TV (or in its general direction, she didn’t seem to be really watching it), “It’s just loud.”  
  
“Loud?” Henry echoed, mostly to himself. Eliza didn’t respond.  
  
“I can’t hear anything, Eliza.”  
  
Eliza now flicked her eyes in his direction briefly, but didn’t turn to face him (typical). “Are you kidding, Henry? It’s totes annoyingly loud and it's ruining my calm, and if my calm gets ruined, my beauty sleep gets ruined, and if my beauty sleeps gets ruined, I wake up looking like capital B – Butt that no amount of morning makeup routine can fix, and there go my morning selfies, and there goes my follower count, and there goes –"  
  
“Okay, okay,” Henry interjected, already having gotten up halfway through that monologue and walked towards the standing air conditioner in the corner of the room. He flicked the dial down so that the nearly imperceptible sound of the air, that he only noticed when standing right on top of it, was completely silent. Turning to face Eliza he pushed up the sleeves on his shirt, a preventative measure against the summer heat that was undoubtedly going to leak in now, and frowned. “There, better?”  
  
Eliza just let out a hum in response, her hand falling to her side from tangled in her hair, and leg still bouncing (albeit at a slower pace). The pink gloss on her parted lips shimmered slightly in the dim light and Henry couldn't help but note the crease around her brow in her otherwise smooth skin. There was something tense in her demeanor, that Henry had come to realize despite all her flouncing around and casual language and devil-may-care attitude about work and bills and anything really, was always there just under the surface.  
  
“Can you move Henry? You’re blocking the TV.”  
  
Or maybe not. Maybe he was just imagining things.

* * *

“Put away your phone when speaking with others,” he told her, folding his napkin and placing it on the table by his salad as he spoke.

“Why?” Eliza asked. 

He poked his head up, fork poised in his hand. She hadn’t ever asked him _why_ before. Sometimes she huffed or protested but when he gave her a direction, she hadn’t yet asked why. He realized, however, that the best tool for a teacher was the curiosity of a student, so he had to happily give her an answer. The problem was he couldn’t think of one. 

“You know why,” he said. It was a cop out. No, to be more accurate, he couldn’t think of how to word the answer. It seemed obvious to him. So it had not exactly occurred to him that it wasn’t obvious to her. That it was not deliberate ill intent that she did something others might be bothered by, but a lack of understanding. The difficulty now was, he had never had to think of how to explain something unspoken aloud. 

At his non-answer, he watched her give a half shrug and squint of her eyes. “Because they’ll be jealous of how popular I am?” 

“Really, Eliza?” He rolled his eyes. 

“No, not really,” she huffed, “I just can’t think of another possible explanation. Phones are life, Henry.” 

“Phones are _not_ life,” he replied sternly. “Water is life. Phones are distraction from proper human connection. They keep you from being fully engaged. They -” 

“- Give you something to do with your hands,” Eliza cut in. He looked up at her, twisting her fingers in a curl of her long hair, “Like, say you’re talking to Joan, and she is totally going on and on about her four cats and you’re thinking, yeah, cats are pretty cool, but you don’t know when she’s gonna _stop_ talking about her freakin’ cats, it’s just going on and on and you’re waiting for your turn to talk but it’s like, what do you _possibly_ say when she’s done giving a monologue about her pets, do you talk about your two cats that _died_ or ask her about her’s again even though really, come on, she said it _all_ already, and it’ll just _keep going_ , and then suddenly it’s over and she's staring at you with those scary untrimmed eyebrows waiting for you to say something, but then you missed what she was even saying in the first place cause you’re just thinking about it forever, and then your face starts to feel all sweaty which really isn’t good if you don’t want your makeup to run, and she’s just staring at you and you’re supposed to say something maybe so then it’s like … you can look at your phone instead.” 

Henry blinked. “ _Really_?” 

“Yes?” 

Henry tried to open his mouth to say something but no sounds came out. He stopped, frowned, set his fork down on his napkin, and looked at her. 

“Or - or!” she started again, holding her hand out towards him. “Say you’re at a party and everyone's in all those little clusters people get into at parties and you’re not sure where to go cause it’s like some low follower count loser popping into a convo chain right in the middle of things and that’s totally uncool and everyone will stare at you and then keep talking without you, so you can like, also, check out your notifications on twitter instead of standing around like an ad revenue reject or maybe get a hella new high score in candy crush.” 

“This is the most ridiculous conversation I’ve ever had,” Henry said, staring at her in bemused amazement. 

“But we’re having one, right?” She smiled playfully. 

He laughed. “Yes, we’re having a conversation, Eliza. Good job.” 

She grinned wider, a slight blush on her cheeks, accented by the curtains of her red hair. Henry felt his face heating up, too, hoping it wasn’t as visible, although the hitch in his breath and sudden wordless staring might give him away. 

“So did you see the new notice Saperstein put up in the break room?” Her voice broke his gaze and he snapped his vision back up to her eyes, nodding as she continued, “Someone stole Larry’s latkes. I swear it wasn’t me.” 

“I wouldn’t think it was, you hate potatoes.” She laughed, raising her objection about why she had a perfectly good reason for that, and from there the conversation dissolved slowly and easily into a natural back and forth, no matter how much or how little she glanced at her phone, or averted her gaze, or unintentionally said something rude - the conversation continued. No instruction, no correction, no change. Just two people talking, keeping each other company, and Henry started to wonder when that had begun to be the majority of their time together, and how it worked so well, when he realized so much about them individually had stayed the same, and it was only in their togetherness that there seemed to be any significant change. 

At the end of it all he still wanted to ask her a question. “So is that really how you feel? When you’re talking to someone, you don’t know how to respond or join in? So you look at your phone?” 

Eliza shrugged. “I guess, yeah.” 

Henry sat with that for a moment. He felt a sudden stirring to open his mouth and confess something to her, something less than flattering on himself as a teacher, but maybe important to apologize for as a friend. “I really thought it was because you didn’t want to be part of the conversation.” 

Eliza hesitated, looking down at the remains of her lunch. She shifted the fork back and forth, her hair falling in front of her face like a curtain or shield. “No one ever wanted to talk to me in school, so I found ways not to talk to them first.” She looked up, tucking in one side of her mouth in contemplation. “So now, I think it’s easier to not be part of the conversation in the first place, than to say the wrong thing.” 

Henry paused. Maybe this was the starting point, maybe the phone was not the problem, but secondary to how she would ‘say the wrong thing’ when talking to others, as he still tried to parse out what all that was, and hiding behind her phone was her way of resolving that. He hoped he could give her a better solution. 

So he shifted up in his seat and nodded as he said confidently and softly, “That makes sense.” 

He thought it was the best comfort he could supply her. Not to tell her it was okay, an empty phrase, or that he understood, because he wasn’t sure he did, or to say he was sorry, something even emptier. But he could do a little better than to tell her that something she did was wrong. He could tell her that something she did made sense. 

* * *

The goalpost may have shifted recently, Henry realized, but the game hadn’t changed. He still had to teach Eliza the proper way to interact with others, or else she was going to be potentially self-absorbed and, more importantly, isolated for the rest of her life. He understood her a little more now, how she didn’t enjoy the outcomes of her behavior, how she’d experienced being bullied and shunned throughout middle and high school, and he was starting to think it was enough to make a meaningful change. 

"We're going to write down rules of social interaction. Actual socializing, not social networking." 

Henry stood in the middle of her living room floor, while she lounged in a chair in front of him, moving back and forth across the space, gesticulating while he spoke. The particular arrangement was supposed to feel like a teacher instructing a pupil, but at the moment it had more the sensation of one person trying to take a load off while the other couldn’t unwind long enough to stop bouncing on his feet.  
  
"Psh," Eliza blew out a puff of air, a strand of red hair displaced from her forehead. "I have a vivacious and kickin' social life. It's all over my feed."  
  
Henry tried to brush past the use of "vivacious" and "kickin'" in the same sentence, although his brain was insistent on stalling on it for the first few seconds. He gave a shake of his head. "That's exactly what I mean, Eliza. A real social life isn't on a 'feed'".  
  
Eliza leaned forward, her eyebrows raised in a daring and slightly conspiratory manner, "So you're saying real life ceases to be real the moment you document it?"  
  
"Um ...," Henry stumbled. 

When no response came from him, she pursed her lips and sat back with her arms folded across her chest. He ignored it and continued.  
  
"Social interactions are a connection between two people," he started again, trying to put on his best lecture voice. If he practiced various skits of oration while pacing back and forth in his office alone, nursing a small dream of being a renowned public speaker, no one had to know. He gestured between himself and Eliza to punctuate his point. They were two people. With a connection. Of some sort. "And it is governed by a certain set of rules."  
  
"Ugggh," Eliza groaned, sliding downward in her seat.  
  
"See, like that!" Henry said, pointing at her. "That's rude!" Vaguely aware he sounded like a 14-year-old who'd just been sneered at by a popular girl at school, he cleared his throat and straightened his posture. "You should listen to people when they are talking, not tune them out if you get bored."  
  
Eliza sat up and perched herself on the edge of the seat. "I didn't _tune you out_ ," she said. "I'm just tired of rules."  
  
"Well, rules create civilized society."  
  
"Boring society."  
  
"Did you want my help or not?"  
  
At that Eliza dipped her head and looked at her hands, manicured nails on the ends of fidgeting fingers. "Fine," she huffed. "But rules never helped me before."  
  
Henry had already started to turn to launch himself into another pacing monologue, but her last words gave him pause. "What rules?"  
  
"The same thing you're talking about." Eliza slumped against the seat and waved her arm in the air, as if indicating an imaginary figure above their heads. "Rules about how to get on with people. They said if I was getting bullied it's cause I wasn't trying hard enough to fit in. I was making people uncomfortable. I should just follow the rules. Except no one even told me what the rules _are_ . So are you going to actually do that?"  
  
Henry blinked, the weight of her words sinking in under the cavalier tone, but before he could process them, he saw that expectant look after her last question. As if she believed he might actually have an answer. As if he had, in any form, his own life together, or things he wanted, or solid relationships, or hadn't also been bullied when he was in school. He was running up against this wall more and more as he spent time with her, questioning what authority he had to do this in the first place. He thought he understood the rules, at least, while Eliza seemed completely oblivious to their existence. Yet his implementation seemed to always fall short of working exactly the way he’d like. The way that made him … not lonely. 

But there she was looking at him like that - like he might hold the world a little safer inside him somewhere, and he could give it to her. So he wasn’t going to just give up without trying. 

"Yes," he said, turning to the end table and picking up a piece of chalk. "We're going to write them down." He’d told her many times, and made her practice over and over, ways in which to conduct herself in interaction with others, but he’d never given her a concrete set of rules, with an equally compelling list of explanations. Tonight, he would.  
  
Eliza perked up and wiggled in place on her seat, eyes following him as he paced across the room to the wall above the fireplace. He turned to look at her. "Come on."  
  
She pointed to herself, question poised in the soft features of her face, and he couldn't help but smile. She got up from the seat and walked over towards him, approaching cautiously. He handed her the chalk.  
  
"First of all, write down - Greet people when I see them." 

She looked at him curiously but then scrawled it across the wall, in a pensive cursive hand. 

“Okay,” he continued, taking the chalk back as she held it out towards him. “People like to be greeted because otherwise it seems as though you are ignoring them.” 

Eliza looked as if she had something to say but she clamped her mouth closed quickly, breathed out through her nose, and then opened again with the simple question, “Got it. What next?” 

Henry licked his lips, turning and walking over to the next blank spot on the wall. He put the chalk to the black surface. “Ask people about themselves,” he said while writing it out. “People like to know you’re interested in them, as well, not just yourself.” 

“Yeah, but, like,” Eliza hummed, “I _know_ all about myself. I don’t know anything about them.”

“That’s the point, Eliza. You ask so you can learn.” 

She bit her lip. “But then how do I know what they’re gonna say? Or what I should say?” 

“You just figure it out.” 

“I thought you were telling me the rules!” 

“Yes, the rules, not a detailed schematic to every conversation you could possibly have. Getting to know people is …,” he glanced over at her, standing there with lanky limbs drawn in and that anxious look on her face - that loose, careless, thoughtless ball of energy she usually was suddenly wound up into one tight, hesitant, overthinking line, “ … unpredictable.” 

This was going to take a while. 

So they continued on through the night. They wrote up and down and all over the walls, while Henry fielded unprecedented question after question to his best attempts at explanations for what he knew of basic social behavior. The night wore on and exasperation from both ends turned over into exhausted laughter, small spats of bickering, and eraser dust clapped over Henry’s head more than once. 

At one point they’d dragged out upturned crates that Henry stood on, bracing himself on his tiptoes, (while Eliza laughed because she was taller, so it made more sense for her to stand to reach, but Henry insisted so that she wouldn't fall) and he scrawled above the threshold of her bedroom door: _"I will not eat over the trash can."_ With the last scrape of the white chalk tail of the ‘n’ against the black wall, he felt a lift of finality in the silent unspoken agreement that they would eat lunch together everyday. _“Because people don’t like to have to eat alone.”_

After they'd littered the walls with notes of this sort and the occasional off topic sketches of flowers and scribbled shoe prices (all Eliza's doing, not his), they stood at the other side of the room by the front door, with more than a few smudges of white chalk dust standing out against Henry's skin.  
  
"I guess, one more thing," he said, holding out the chalk to her. There was a small bit of space left on the wall by the doorway, crammed between the corner and a clothing rack. "Remember to look people in the eyes." He smiled at that, remembering it being one of the first things he had ever told her, and tried to meet her eyes with his. He’d told her the same before, “maintaining eye contact let’s people know you’re listening” but now he searched for an additional explanation, one he knew a little better sitting inside his heart, “and let’s people know you care.”  
  
She shifted her gaze, looking back into his eyes for mere seconds and then darting her own away, looking down at the floor between their hands, her own nearly brushing against the nub of chalk sticking out between his fingers. They were standing close. He could see the rise and fall of her chest and feel her breath on his collarbone. She wouldn’t look at him though. Her eyes sought his and then immediately flicked away, not as if she was disinterested or nervous or shy, but like she couldn’t hold on a second longer than that before she didn’t want to see him anymore.

Henry swallowed, feeling the hurt stick in his chest despite himself. He'd thought they'd connected, the two of them. Their sessions were starting to feel less formal, however much he didn't want to admit it. They'd laughed and become covered in chalk, and ate lunch together, and he was feeling almost as if he had a close friend more than a project, or a pupil, or a coworker. But she'd looked away, even when he’d spelled it out for her, quite literally against the wall of her home. She looked away and maybe didn’t care with as much depth as he felt. 

He coughed, dusting his hands together to wipe off the chalk, and moved over towards the couch to gather his coat and other things. “I think that’s good for now,” he said. “You can look at these rules to remind yourself and hopefully your interactions with people will go a little more smoothly from now on.” 

As he bent over to pick up his briefcase, she trotted after him into the boxed in area between the coffee table and armchair. “You’re still going to keep helping me out though, right?” 

He started, turning back with his briefcase in hand, and finding her standing very close again, frown across her face. “Ye - yes. We’ll keep working together, no worries.”

She visibly sighed, the tension in her muscles relaxing. “Okay, good.” 

He nodded, moving around her towards the door. He’d been foolish, thinking this was more than a work arrangement for her, getting something she needed out of it, until she was ready to do these things on her own, and leave him sitting in his private office again, staring at an unused London decorated trash can. 

“Henry?” 

“Yeah?” He turned back to face her, coat flung over his forearm and hand hovering above the doorknob. 

“Thanks,” she smiled, walking up to him and quickly wrapping her long arms around his shoulders, then pulling away. “I’m glad you’re my friend.” 

He nodded, dumbly, shoulder blades still tingly from the contact, and swallowed to find his voice. “Right,” he squeaked out, “See - see you tomorrow.” He ducked out the door and leaned heavily against it once it was closed behind him. _“I’m glad you’re my friend”_ \- and she’d still been looking away when she said it.  
  
He picked himself up, shaking it off, and moving towards the elevator. There were a certain set of rules to govern relationships. Steps and stages in ways of measuring closeness and care. There were a certain set of rules. But there certainly were no rules to understanding his relationship with Eliza.

* * *

As it turned out, Henry lied to himself. He avoided Eliza for the next several days. Of course, he couldn’t truly avoid her, seeing as they worked together and he had no good reason to not continue to be cordial. But he deftly declined and made excuses for every other possible interaction they could have, whether it was faking an important call during their lunch hour, or a private matter to attend to at home when they might have otherwise spent after work hours in session. To her credit, Eliza handled each rebuff with grace, if not with an increasingly confused expression passing across her face. It pained him to see that, but he was dealing with a personal crisis. He was starting to consider her a friend. In fact, he had considered her a friend for a long time now. A friend, or friend-adjacent, but definitely not only a coworker or pupil. 

Except, now he was not sure how to maintain that friendship. Everything he was teaching her, about how to connect with other people, was running up against the walls of how he understood her. And Henry still didn’t know if he could change something that he did not understand, but he did know you couldn’t be friends with someone you did not understand, and more to the point, he knew you couldn’t be friends with someone you wanted to change. 

“Your ginger friend,” Julia started, setting down the glass. Henry wrinkled his brow and gave a small nod, wondering why she never referred to Eliza by her name. “She’s quite a character, isn’t she?” Her tone was playful but Henry couldn’t help but note an edge in it that bothered him.  
  
He only gave a small smile and moved to sit on the couch, looking at her expectantly, not sure where this line of conversation was going.  
  
“You said your friendship has been built upon you helping her learn the various mores of appropriate social behavior, correct?”  
  
Henry shifted in his seat. “Yes, well, when we first met ... she asked me if I could help her with that ... yes.”  
  
“It’s very fascinating,” Julia commented, sitting beside him and reaching to pour a glass for him and herself. “I wonder what sort of commentary her deficits in communication and behavior might highlight for this younger generation ... or perhaps just on their own in her particular psyche.”  
  
She handed Henry his glass.  
  
Taking it in hand Henry frowned down at the sloshing liquid. It wasn’t an edge in her voice that he’d detected - she seemed as unperturbed by the nature of his and Eliza’s relationship as she’d first claimed she was. It was a condescension. He swallowed, the glass in hand suddenly projecting a bitter taste in his mouth, knowing he recognized it in Julia’s voice only because he was familiar with it in his own. For the many first weeks he’d known Eliza, he’d looked at her like a project, like something to study, and her many quirks and characteristics as abnormalities under a microscope that he could possibly mold and shape into something more presentable.

“She doesn’t look people in the eye,” Henry heard himself saying, still staring down at his glass. 

“Does she not?” Julia asked. 

Henry shook his head. “I’ve tried to teach her over and over, it’s considered rude and inattentive, but she keeps avoiding it.” - _just like I’m avoiding her_. 

“That is a shame,” Julia spoke, setting her glass down and folding her hands in her lap thoughtfully. 

“I’m starting to not mind though,” Henry said, still unsure how the words were spilling out of his mouth. “I don’t know why, but now I really don’t mind. I know her. I can overlook it.” 

Julia let out a small hum. “Well,” she started, “even if you don’t, the rest of the world will certainly mind.” 

That was it, Henry thought. The comment struck him, making something burn angry inside of him. Whatever was between the two of them, was only the two of them, and the rest of the world was still demanding and unflappable and saw Eliza Dooley, awkward and weird and looking at her phone, as unacceptable. That was the world Eliza had to live in.

Increasingly, Henry saw that what he thought of as a source of frustration on his end regarding all the things Eliza didn't seem to know or didn't naturally do, he started to feel from where she was standing, as a source of anxiety. It was anxiety over a world that was large and confusing and hostile, that she was just barely holding onto, and that refused to not mind. 

In the face of that, a couple of words behind a static avatar and quantifiable numbers of likes and retweets seemed a lot more palatable. Relationships were confusing and Henry knew that - he was fairly certain everyone felt that way most of the time, and they would all like a definable set of rules to make them understandable. Everyone followed the rules they knew were ultimately untenable to give just a bit more stability and order to the confusion of it all. The difference between him and her wasn't so much. Henry applied these rules to every relationship in his life and Eliza applied them as they were given. He just wondered if the rules even mattered in the first place. 

Henry stood up. 

“Is something the matter?” Julia asked. 

Henry looked down at her, and at his feet and the way he was standing now, and then towards the door. “I have to go speak with Eliza about something,” he said, turning back to Julia. “Sorry.” 

She had stormed into his office and asked him to change her. She had wanted to connect with more people in her life. She had wanted to avoid the ridicule and hatred of her peers. She had asked him for the rules. 

Now, he was breaking all of them. For her. 

* * *

He left the apartment and headed to Eliza’s. He got to her door and knocked until she answered, wearing a shirt and shorts, her hair surprisingly unstyled, and a bewildered look on her face at the sight of him. He looked back at her and then opening his mouth launched right into what he was going to say. 

“I don’t mind if you don’t make eye contact. To be quite honest, I don’t mind at all. Of course, I mind a little bit, but I am trying not to, even if it’s confusing. At this point, all I care is that I understand you as a friend. It may be selfish of me, but if you don’t look me in the eye, or respond appropriately in every conversation, or sometimes keep staring at your phone, I think it is still worth getting to know you as a person. Because we have connected, over these past few months, I think we have connected in some way, and yet, I haven’t taught you a single thing. You haven’t retained anything I’ve told you! You are a terrible student, really, Eliza, you are - and that’s because I am a terrible teacher. I have tried to teach you about how to get to know other people before truly getting to know you. So, I am thinking I want to end our arrangement … and I … I want to begin to understand you as a friend much more than I want to teach you how to change.” 

He took a deep breath, stopping, his hands brushing against his long coat, and looked at her, staring intently back at him, her eyes wide and brow furrowed. “Eliza?” he asked. She opened her mouth and didn’t speak, continuing to hold onto the edge of the door, perplexed. “What do you think? About what I said? Do you - I mean, do you want to -” 

"I didn't hear a word you said!" Eliza cut him off with a whine, frustration clear in her tone.  
  
"What?” Henry stopped, mouth falling open. “ _Nothing_ ?? What were you thinking about?"  
  
"I wasn't thinking about anything! I was trying to listen like you told me to but it was so distracting -"  
  
"What do you mean? What was distracting?"  
  
"Your face!"  
  
Henry stared at her and watched as a blush crept up over her cheeks as the words sank in.  
  
"Uh, I mean ... not your ... well, yeah but like ... your eyes?"  
  
"My eyes."  
  
"Yeah, like," Eliza said, churning her arms in front of her, "you know, trying to look you in the eye like you say to do, like you wrote,” she stopped, pointing at the wall. “And I'm just thinking 'okay, remember to look people in the eyes' and I have to keep thinking it and it’s very overwhelming and I can't like ... hear what you're saying."  
  
Henry couldn't help it. He thought about all the weeks and months of talking to her, trying to teach her something. Over and over again wondering why she just couldn’t do it and the answer was so simple, if someone had asked, or she’d had the confidence to say so. He laughed.  
  
"So you're saying that doing what I said indicates you're listening to someone actually keeps you from listening to them at all?"  
  
"Yeah," Eliza nodded eagerly and Henry let out a short laugh again, causing her to frown instead and let out a pique of protest.  
  
"I'm not laughing at you," Henry said. "It's just ... it's ridiculous. Not you. Just ... everything. Everything I've been teaching you."  
  
Eliza blinked. "What? Are you quitting?"

All this time, telling her to make eye contact with others because of what it supposedly meant to them, but never considering what it meant to her.  
  
"You've improved so much Eliza and I don't think it has anything to do with me."  
  
"Of course it does." Eliza shook her head in confusion. "You've been helping me so much."  
  
"I've just been telling you a bunch of arbitrary rules about how to conduct yourself. I mean, look at me, you're actually my only - ... well, it's not as if I'm any authority on this stuff ... relationships. And I've messed up plenty of times just ... with you."  
  
"But you're there for me." She gave a soft smile and despite himself he mirrored it before she continued. "So, like, maybe some of the stuff you tell me is stupid but ... you help me talk to people for the first time and you encourage me to follow through on my good ideas and reconnect with my sister and pay my bills and stand up to Corynn and ... so you are helping me, right?"  
  
"I think I help you best when I'm just being your friend. And you help me, too, from the very start. As my friend." 

Eliza smiled. 

“If that’s what you wanted,” Henry said, quietly, afraid of the words even as he spoke, “If you wanted to have a - a friend. I hope I can be a good one. And that we can learn that, how to be friends, together.” 

“... I would like that,” Eliza said, in that small voice he recognized now as reverence at being accepted by someone else, at a world, or a person, who didn’t try to make her change. 

Henry thought he understood something different now. That's what a successful relationship was - figuring out your own rules. Every person was a constellation of different modes of thinking and interacting and showing affection. What friendship really meant wasn't meeting on the neutral ground of a set of rules applied uniformly from outside. It was committing to figuring out another person's meanings and feelings and ways of operating, no matter how different or strange to you. Learning each other's rules, compromises and combinations, until you had a whole new game to play that was just between the two of you. 

“Okay then,” he let out a breath of relief, patting his hands against his sides. “Um,” he looked around, “would it be alright if I came in for a while? We could … watch something.”

“Yeah,” Eliza nodded, a grin breaking out on her face. “Totes, we can even watch one of those super boring old man documentaries you like.” 

“Oh, how gracious of you,” Henry intoned sarcastically as he stepped inside. 

Eliza smiled with a hint of teasing and shyness, her eyes darting to the floor and back to him. “What are friends for?” 

Henry smiled back. “I think we’ll figure it out.”  
  



End file.
